Worklife

Ramblings about workplace culture, life in Japan, and then some.

Brainstorming: Japanese way, North American way

Apr 01, 2003 15:50 pm / 2 comments

In busi­ness con­text, with aver­age workers:

Brain storm­ing the Japan­ese way: In order for one to have a suc­cess­ful brain storm­ing ses­sion with Japan­ese, set­ting time, meet­ing in a for­mal con­fer­ence room, to have a high rank­ing supe­rior attend will not be a good set up. If such set up is used, it will take some coax­ing of free exchange of ideas, and it takes time. Pres­ence of supe­rior will restrict the ses­sion since peo­ple are thor­oughly trained for obe­di­ence by the edu­ca­tion sys­tem. If one was to round up a few peo­ple in a moment’s notice in an open area, one has bet­ter chance of good brain storm­ing ses­sion. Whichever the way, a good facil­i­ta­tor who keeps the group focused is a must.

Brain storm­ing the North Amer­i­can way: Easy to have a good brain storm­ing ses­sion, since most peo­ple are self ini­ti­at­ing. Not much encour­age­ment is needed to get ideas flow­ing. Although space fac­tor do exist, wher­ever the ses­sion is con­ducted, work­ers are less reserved than Japanese.

 

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2 Comments

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1. nob seki said on Apr 02, 2003 13:20 pm:

In an OB (Orga­ni­za­tional Behav­ior) class I attended a cou­ple of years ago, I found out that estab­lish­ment and devel­op­ment of social net­works vary between Japan and NA. It seems to me that Amer­i­can peo­ple pre­fer a casual con­ver­sa­tion, which gets brain storm­ing eas­ier, so that space fac­tor mat­ters more than Japan­ese peo­ple do.

In that class, a uni­ver­sity vis­it­ing pro­fes­sor as well as an IBM con­sul­tant talked about knowl­edge man­age­ment. He said that they first draw a map of social net­works of a company/division to ana­lyze and find bot­tle necks of knowl­edge sharing/transfer. Then they pro­pose such ways as chang­ing the office lay­out to make key peo­ple com­mu­ni­cate more often.

Well, I do think such analy­sis is also impor­tant to Japan­ese offices, but may be based upon a bit dif­fer­ent philoso­phies, due to Japan­ese busi­ness cus­toms such as the way of brain storm­ing or the unique job rota­tion sys­tem that tie per­sons who enter their com­pany at the same time, which may finally result in phe­nom­ena of “autonomous” knowl­edge tran­fer, or Kaizen.


 
2. Fujiko Suda said on Apr 02, 2003 18:24 pm:

seki-san, many thanks for your com­ment! Your input is valuble.

Based on my lim­ited expe­ri­ences in brain storm­ing ses­sions with North Amer­i­cans and Japan­ese groups, North Amer­i­cans seemed they were more relaxed, com­pared to Japan­ese regard­less of loca­tion. Per­haps it is rel­a­tive issue of method in expression.

Also, gen­er­ally speak­ing, Japan­ese seems to be good at kaizen kind of brain storm­ing, where North Amer­i­cans good at start­ing with gen­eral, new ideas.


 

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